Additional Factors

Wind was discussed in a previous article stating that many persons consider it one of the biggest factors involved with regard to a dog’s performance.

Other factors which affect a dog’s performance are terrain, tightness of the marks to one another, the placement of the marks, the sequence in which the marks fall, cover, water, and various elements with regard to water such as high waves and/or strong currents.  Lighting can be considered a factor as far as the visibility of the marks, the guns, the handler to the dog, and the dog to the handler.

Anything that has an influence on a dog’s actions with regard to either marking or blinds can fall under the term “factor”. 

With reference to terrain, it is important to introduce your dog to as wide a variety as possible.  On side hills, dogs want to either run up them or down.  They will many times tend to hunt on top of a hill.  You want to work with your dog so he can learn to carry a side hill.  Once again, using drills can often be a good show and tell method of introducing your dog to various aspects of terrain.  Once he understands it, then you can do cold blinds and marks, and handle if necessary if he is giving in to the elements.

Island marks are always difficult to teach.  Since I don’t have any islands (or true training water within well over 150 miles other than the ocean), whenever I find water with islands, I really want to work my dogs with regard to finding marks on them, past them, over them, and any other variations I can contrive.

Shorelines provide a considerable amount of suction.  The dog I have mentioned before that I bought as a three year old washout, would swim in the middle of the lake or run high on the shore, he had no in-between and became very, very nervous swimming parallel to a shoreline.  It took a lot of time and effort working him on drills for him to feel comfortable swimming alongside a shoreline, angling along a shore on land before entering water, not getting in fat and getting on a point and coming off it without becoming anxious.

Running from hills, going through ditches, running through corn fields, hay fields (both mowed and those with bales in them), alfalfa fields, sagebrush, dealing with rolling landscape, marking with trees in the background, doing marks and blinds in stick ponds, and in my case, working around soccer nets (!) are good for training.

Whenever you are outside your area and have access to new training grounds, utilize them.  There are many drills you can use to help teach your dog how to handle these various factors.  With imagination, you can often set up things to teach the concepts even if you don’t have the terrain.  I have used obedience/agility jumps to work on jumping obstacles.  You can brush these in to work on going over more natural looking obstacles.  Even if you can’t find a large area for use in training, try to find what I call my “bits and pieces”

You can make the most of  a small ditch, some brush that is safe to put a dog through, pot holes, roads that you can angle, a log to jump, parks that have unnatural objects for a dog to run through or near-----be creative.  Any diversions on the way to a mark or blind can influence the dog from maintaining a straight path.

Marks that are strategically placed can highly influence a dog.   A short retired gun in front of a visible long gun, especially if tight, can induce the dog to overrun the short retired.  Dogs will flare marks or suck back to where a flyer was previously retrieved.  Well placed gun stations can produce an impact.  Training on a variety of marking concepts can help your dog to understand and feel comfortable when facing such factors.

Think what happens when you have a multitude of factors----an island mark that your dog has to reach while swimming through water with a strong current on a very windy day when the lighting is poor!!!!  Wow!

The more you can expose your dog to a diversity of experiences, the better are your chances of success in competing in a WC/WCX, in hunt tests and in field trials

Obviously, you will use common sense and have the utmost regard for the safety of your dog when training.